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October 18, 1963 · the Stepan Center, Notre Dame
The invitation: Martin Luther King Jr. came to South Bend because a South Bend woman asked him. Alphia Ganaway, a west-side resident, invited him; Dr. Roland Chamblee and other Black leaders formed a Citizens' Civic Planning Committee to build the visit; and President Theodore Hesburgh put at King's disposal the Stepan Center, then brand new on the Notre Dame campus. The visit's civic machinery is part of its record: a motorcade of fifty cars and twenty police officers brought King from the airport to a downtown news conference and a dinner at First United Methodist Church, and at 8:15 that evening, Friday, October 18, 1963 — seven weeks after the March on Washington — he addressed a crowd of 3,000 in the Stepan Center. Louise Overall Weaver Smothers, Mahalia Jackson's organist, performed.
The speech: The address, "Facing the Challenge of a New Age," ran just over forty-nine minutes, and its tape and film are held by the Notre Dame Archives. King pressed for a strong civil rights bill and, in this telling, denounced Attorney General Robert Kennedy's support for a watered-down one. The evening raised money for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. King afterward wrote Ganaway a letter of thanks — the invitation answered in his own hand. The visit's organizers and its crowd are the event; the movement it belonged to is told in Black History, where the city's own civil-rights record — the Natatorium fight, the newspapers, the long desegregation case — stands at its full size.
Sources:
- University of Notre Dame Public Affairs, 2013 — the fiftieth-anniversary account: Ganaway's invitation, the committee, the Stepan Center, the 3,000.
- Monica Tetzlaff (Indiana University South Bend), "On Campus: MLK at ND," Notre Dame Magazine — the motorcade, the news conference, the First United Methodist dinner, the 8:15 address.
- Notre Dame Archives — the tape and film of the address; Stanford King Institute, the King Online Records Access record 631018-000 for the October 18, 1963 speech.